The Day

 The Day.

The days creep by, nothing really happens, everything is ordered except the chaos in my mind. I usually wake up around 7 am, lie awake for 10 minutes, then I go downstairs and grind the coffee beans ready for breakfast. Routine is good; it gives a sense of order.

After breakfast, my wife and I went ‘shopping’ for the few essentials we thought we might need during the day. We’re not the sort of people who stock up on food; we get our daily meals from the local shops. We don’t plan ahead. We also have plenty of local shops selling fresh vegetables and fruit, great bakeries, and small supermarkets. We live in a multi-cultural area, which is fast becoming taken over by the ‘trendy middle class,’ the guys with ‘man buns, the cargo bicycles with children as freight. The people who sit in coffee bars, taking an hour to drink a coffee while they stare at a laptop screen, giving the impression that they have a job of some kind.

It seems this is always the way: the run-down areas where poorer people live get an influx of artists and creatives looking for cheap accommodation; they make the place more upbeat and fun, and soon the money arrives. People who want to be seen as creative or ‘potential artists’, thinking they can somehow become an artist by being around artists. Inner city evolution.

Today we only needed a few things, we went to the ‘Biological market’ - a shop where you bring your own container for your food, which is stocked in biodegradable bins or just laid out on pallets, giving the impression that the food you buy has just been dropped there by some local farmer. The ‘trendies’ who shop there are probably nice, well-meaning people, but they look so damn miserable. It’s an attitude that seems to say, “Look at me sacrificing joy and happiness to save the planet and live healthier.”

It gives me a chuckle or two as I walk among them. I had placed some flyers here for my new show. After two weeks, hardly any flyers had been taken. Stand-up comedy is seen as being the lowest of the lowest forms of art for the entitled few, unless the comedian has immigration roots or is on the spectrum or gender fluid. Some ‘old white heterosexual comedian’ is not worthy of a glance; ageism is one of the few tolerable ‘isms’ for the hip and trendy. Who cares? I don’t envy these people, keeping up an appearance every day, like wearing a uniform of disdain for anything that might challenge their pretence. A lot of this sort has taken over the comedy scene, thinking they are so progressive, though they hardly ever challenge the social system; their ‘thing’ is to be superficially correct, wear the right clothes, and say the right things without challenging the capitalist system. Why should they? They love it. Times change.

During this last year, I have struggled with the thought of having to give up Comedy, accepting that ‘it’s my turn to become irrelevant and fade into the past’. I still have gigs, quite a few, but the times are changing, comedy has to be palatable for the masses now, no politics, no cutting edge, just funny little jokes that never challenge those in power, ‘one liners’ are back, puns are abounding, just don’t challenge the powers that be in the media and you’ll be accepted in the bland television programmes that will make you a star.

For me, comedy was the peaceful way of getting a message across, that was the meaning of it all, and yes, we earned money doing it, but the main reason we performed was for the genre itself. Now, the aim seems to be ‘get famous and rich’, that’s it. Celebrity magazines are now full of the (few) comedians allowed into the celebrity world, talking about their ‘lifestyles’. Comedy has become the front door to the world of celebrity, whereas it used to be the back door to the subversion of societal values.

We used to think of comedians being the small boy in the tale of ‘The Emperor's New Clothes’, looking at the pretence of grandeur and being the only one to say that the Emperor was, in fact, naked. Now comedians are in the Emperor's parade, part of the ‘system’, court jesters rather than critical observers.

The ‘Brave New World’ is upon us; get the right tattoos and join the programme, or get out of the way.